THE WAR ECONOMY THAT KEEPS CONGO BLEEDING

On 27 January 2025, the M23 rebels once again captured Goma, the beating heart of North Kivu. For the rest of the world, it was another headline in a long list of African tragedies. But for us, it was a reminder of the truth the world keeps ignoring — this war is not about ethnicity, politics, or even revenge. It is about money. It is about a criminal economy so powerful that it has turned war itself into a business.

Since 1996, when the first foreign boots crossed our eastern border, Congo’s soil has been treated like an open market for the highest bidder. The M23 are not freedom fighters — they are businessmen with guns. They capture cities not for ideology, but for income. Wherever they go, they build parallel systems of taxation, smuggling, and extortion. They have turned violence into an economic strategy.

When they seized Bunagana, a trading town on the Ugandan border, they did not just plant flags — they took over trade routes worth millions every month. Trucks still cross into Uganda in defiance of the law, refueling at rebel-controlled depots while customs officers look the other way. Everyone gets a cut — the rebels, the officials, the smugglers — everyone except the people.

Then came Rubaya, the crown jewel. A small mining town near Goma that produces 15% of the world’s coltan — the mineral that powers every smartphone, laptop, and electric car on earth. Since May 2024, M23 has turned Rubaya into its own financial headquarters, taxing miners, controlling exports, and sending the minerals through Rwanda where they are “cleaned” and rebranded as Rwandan. From there, they enter the global market — from European tech giants to Asian factories. Our suffering becomes their supply chain.

This is not chaos; it is coordination. Rwanda’s government dreams of making Kigali the regional hub for mineral processing and trade. To achieve that, it needs Congo’s resources, not Congo’s permission. By supporting M23 and building trade corridors into our territory, Rwanda has turned war into policy. Their soldiers cross borders, their businessmen cross markets, and their government crosses every moral line.

But let us not pretend Kinshasa is innocent. Our own leaders have their hands in the same blood-soaked business. The Congolese army works hand in glove with militias, rebels, and foreign soldiers. FARDC commanders protect Burundian smugglers who move gold out of the country. They do deals with the FDLR — a group accused of genocide — to control the trade in charcoal and timber, even from protected areas like Virunga National Park, home to the last mountain gorillas. How do you protect a country when its army sells its forests and fights its own people?

The war has become an industry — funded by greed, sustained by corruption, and protected by global indifference. The money moves faster than the bullets. From the forests of Kivu to the offices of Dubai and Hong Kong, Congo’s minerals are laundered, polished, and sold as clean. And every time a smartphone lights up somewhere in the world, a Congolese child may have died for it.

The international community’s peace processes — in Nairobi, Luanda, Washington, Doha — have all failed because they refuse to confront this truth. You cannot make peace with people who profit from war. The diplomats talk about ceasefires, while the warlords negotiate mining routes. The sanctions the West imposes are symbolic, targeting people who no longer hold real power. The ones who fund this blood economy — in Kigali, in Kampala, in Dubai, in Geneva — remain untouched.

If the world truly wants peace in Congo, it must start where the money starts. Sanction the companies that buy minerals from Rwanda and Uganda. Expose the traders who launder Congo’s wealth through fake export licenses. Freeze the accounts of generals, politicians, and foreign businessmen who profit from smuggling. And force every manufacturer using coltan, gold, or cobalt to trace it back to the source — to the mines, to the rebels, to the victims.

But even sanctions are not enough. Congo needs to rebuild a legal economy that competes with the illegal one. The east must no longer be a warzone; it must be a marketplace of honest opportunity. Roads, refineries, schools, and jobs — not guns — must define our future.

For thirty years, the world has watched us die for our minerals. Now we demand that it watch us live for them. Peace will not come from negotiations between men in suits — it will come when war is no longer profitable.

Until that day, every phone that rings and every car that drives carries a trace of Congolese blood.